Destination: United States
British Airways: Introducing the ‘Son of Concorde’
by Eva Holland | 09.30.09 | 4:42 PM ET
With BA’s luxury London-New York route launching this week—exactly forty years after the Concorde’s first flight—the Independent’s Simon Calder takes a closer look at the new service, and at the history of luxury and business class-only air travel.
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Yahoo! BuzzDan Brown Tourism Hits D.C.
by Eva Holland | 09.30.09 | 12:06 PM ET
That was quick. Two weeks after the release of his latest, “The Lost Symbol,” and the Dan Brown-themed travel stories about the city where it’s set—Washington, D.C.—are already piling up.
Video You Must See: Burning Man in Time Lapse
by Eva Holland | 09.29.09 | 4:42 PM ET
(Via The Daily Dish)
Alaska and the Cruise Industry Go to Court
by Eva Holland | 09.29.09 | 2:12 PM ET
With several major cruise lines headed into the courtroom to challenge Alaska’s $50-per-cruise-passenger “head tax,” Rob Lovitt takes a broader look at the uneasy relationship between the cruise industry and the state. Here’s his take on a return visit to Skagway after a 20-year absence:
I was gobsmacked by the changes. Instead of one ship, there were three, each of which probably carried 2,000-2,500 passengers. With 6,000-plus cruisers unloading simultaneously, Broadway was more or less impassable, and while the Sweet Tooth and Red Onion were still there, they were joined by the likes of Del Sol, Tanzanite International and other absurdly out-of-place outposts of Caribbean kitsch.
And it’s not just Skagway. A recent editorial in the Juneau Empire bemoaned the “yuck factor” created by the dozens of jewelry stores and trinket shops along the city’s main tourist drag. Written, surprisingly enough, by a local economic development booster, the piece didn’t single out the cruise industry, but it doesn’t take an advanced degree in tourism management to realize that cruise ships and curio shops go together like buffet lines and bulging waistlines.
High-Speed Rail Watch: From Russia to America?
by Eva Holland | 09.28.09 | 2:43 PM ET
A new breed of locomotive-less high-speed train will launch in Russia in December, running between St. Petersburg and Moscow—and Siemens, the German company behind the new model, is hoping to bring it to America next. The New York Times has the details.
The ‘Entity Formerly Known as the British Empire’ Has Some Advice for an America in Decline
by Michael Yessis | 09.28.09 | 12:31 PM ET
More McSweeney’s hilarity from World Hum contributor Kate Hahn. Here’s one bit of advice for the U.S. from the former British Empire, delivered from a bar on the Costa del Sol:
Look, I’ve been there. Coffers empty. Troops everywhere. Economy sour. Your empire’s finished. But just because I’m retired doesn’t mean I can’t be useful. Here’s how you get through it.
First off: lean on your family. And by that I don’t mean the hearth-and-home sort, I mean royals. Make the office of the president of the United States more regal. Pomp and circumstance distracts you from the fact that you don’t matter anymore. Have guards stand outside the White House gates in some kind of regalia. Celebrate the president’s birthday—not just the dead ones, the one you have now. What’s his ... Bomama ... Obama, yes, yes, the Kenyan.
Ah, Kenya. Mine once. Moment for Kenya.
McDonald’s in America, Mapped
by Eva Holland | 09.25.09 | 12:59 PM ET
Check out this cool (if slightly disturbing) map of every McD’s location in the lower 48—where, apparently, you’re never more than 107 miles away from the nearest Big Mac.
National Parks Travel Posters, Resurrected
by World Hum | 09.25.09 | 12:23 PM ET
By Doug Leen Doug Leen helped rescue some WPA travel posters from oblivion. Here's a look at 11 of his stunning originals and re-creations.
Interview With Doug Leen: The Lost National Parks Travel Posters
by Eli Ellison | 09.25.09 | 12:06 PM ET
Eli Ellison learns how the former National Park ranger resurrected a long-forgotten series of Depression-era prints
Portraits from the New York Subway
by Eva Holland | 09.25.09 | 9:47 AM ET
Improv Everywhere is back. (You remember the group that “froze” Grand Central last year?) This time around, they posed as MTA-contracted photographers, taking photos of passengers on the New York subway for an eventual subway yearbook. The result is not just a funny gag, but a pretty cool set of portraits, too. Check it out:
(Via Boing Boing)
What if the Burj Dubai was in Manhattan?
by Eva Holland | 09.24.09 | 4:26 PM ET
Kottke posts an altered version of the Midtown skyline. Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?
It’s Been a Great Year for America’s Parks
by Eva Holland | 09.23.09 | 12:15 PM ET
The travel industry as a whole may have struggled through 2009, but the country’s national parks are on track for record attendance numbers this year. The AP offers some thoughts on what’s driving the increase.
The Oregon-Guanajuato Connection
by Jim Benning | 09.23.09 | 11:22 AM ET
Nice story in the Global Post about a particularly potent sister city relationship between Ashland, Oregon, and Guanajuato, Mexico:
While other cross-continental matchings are largely symbolic, this relationship has fostered academic and musical exchanges, helped build houses—and even led to 79 marriages.
I gotta say, Ashland couldn’t have picked a better sister city than Guanajuato. The Spanish colonial city doesn’t get the attention it deserves—it’s one of my favorite places in Mexico.
The Rise of America as Culinary Destination
by Michael Yessis | 09.23.09 | 9:55 AM ET
Just a few decades ago, America was a culinary wasteland. Now, it’s foodie central. Why? Jerry Weinberger points to, among other things, the Great Woman theory of history:
The first wedding gift my wife and I received, in 1965, was a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child (with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle). It still sits on a shelf in our kitchen, bound now by tape, with almost every page earmarked and blotched. Published in 1961, Child’s book brought the techniques of French haute cuisine to the American kitchen, teaching us how to soak and sauté sweetbreads, how to make soufflé au Grand Marnier, how to cut up a duck—all within the limits of the American supermarket of the period. But it was Child’s later TV show, Boston PBS’s The French Chef, that really changed things. It was unintimidating French cooking: the chef was a goofy-talking giant who dumped in the butter and occasionally spilled things and whacked stuff with mallets and sometimes burned the sauce.
But Julia taught us how to master French cooking, not American. American food had to be invented before it could be mastered. And the inventor was another Great Woman, this one on the opposite coast. In 1971, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. This was the great transformative event in American culinary history. Chez Panisse grew out of Waters’s experience not with the butter and fat of Parisian haute cuisine, but with the foods of Mediterranean Provence (based on olive oil, the fresh fruits of the earth and sea, and the general habit of going to the market with a string bag every day). The principle of Chez Panisse was that food—both animal and vegetable—should be absolutely fresh, and that meant absolutely local. So it’s not quite right to say that Waters had to invent American food; what she did was rediscover and then elaborate on pre-canned, pre-supermarket, pre-tomatoes-all-year-round regional American food.
Video We Love: David Byrne Cycles Times Square
by Eva Holland | 09.21.09 | 12:41 PM ET
0:19—“Lady, if I was a truck you wouldn’t be doing that.”
1:31—“Times Square, crossroads of the world.”
2:27—“Sometimes when I tell people I ride around New York they think I’m crazy. That may be.”
3:52—“If this were a bike lane, there would be a truck from New Jersey in it.”